At the Erie School District, no more hoodies

Sunday

A year after its massive reconfiguration, district focuses on discipline policy, attendance

A year ago at this time, the Erie School District was rushing to finish its sweeping reconfiguration, including the creation of Erie High.

When school starts this year, on Aug. 27, the changes at the 11,500-student district will be far less drastic or dramatic. But they will still affect students, their families and their teachers.

One of the biggest shifts involves hoodies.

The district is banning all students from wearing the hooded sweatshirts on school property during the school day. The ban is one of several changes included in the revised student handbook, which the Erie School Board approved on June 20 and which students will get on the first day of school.

The hoodie ban and other significant changes to the handbook grew out of a review of issues that arose during 2017-18. The changes, district officials also said, are designed to bring the district's rules more in line with its five-year strategic plan, which the School Board also approved in June.

Superintendent Brian Polito and his staff developed the strategic plan to coincide with the district's financial recovery, which the district is undertaking following its receipt of additional annual state aid of $14 million. The delivery of the aid started in 2017-18.

The strategic plan focuses on how the district, with its improved but still limited financial resources, can meet six "game-changing" targets. They include getting the district's graduation rate to 100 percent, improving reading proficiency for the district's youngest students, improving attendance and making discipline more proportional among all students, regardless of race.

"We really see this year as focusing on education and starting to improve our scores and really making some inroads in our strategic plan goals," Polito said.

But several changes, including the hoodie ban, are still on the way for 2018-19. Here is a list:

Hoodies

The Erie School District had allowed students to wear hooded sweatshirts throughout the day as long as the hoods were down. With too many students keeping the hoods up, the district moved to ban the hooded sweatshirts for all students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

"Students were wearing hoodies during the day and putting the hoods up over their heads. You could not tell who the student was," said Neal Brokman, who worked on revising the student handbook as the Erie School District's director of alternative programming.

He said earbuds added to the problem.

"Not only could you not see their face, but when somebody — another student or an adult — was trying to address them, they couldn't hear you," Brokman said. "It became too much."

The new rule states: "Outerwear and hoodies: Outerwear, including hoodies, must be placed in lockers from 'bell to bell' and is not permitted to be worn during the school day. Outerwear includes but is not limited to coats/jackets, hoodies, windbreakers, wind pants, gloves, hats, bandanas and scarves."

Under the old rule, students who did not keep their hoods down were not allowed to wear hoodies. Brokman said the rule became too difficult to enforce because of the number of students who were keeping their hoods up.

"It was a constant battle," he said.

Brokman and Polito said they know of no other school districts in the area that prohibit the wearing of hoodies. In the General McLane School District, for instance, Superintendent Rick Scaletta said students can wear hooded sweatshirts as long as they keep the hoods down.

Scaletta said he is sure that students are tempted to put up the hoods and enter into "their cocoon."

Time changes

The Erie School District reworked its student start and end times in 2017-18 to accommodate transportation changes due to its reconfiguration. After reviewing the transportation needs and other factors, the district readjusted the times for 2018-19 and announced the new times in May.

• Elementary school students will start at 8 a.m. and be dismissed at 2:30 p.m. Those students had attended school from 9:20 a.m. to 3:40 p.m., with free before-school programs running from 7:40 to 8:40 a.m.

• High school students will start at 8:40 a.m. and be dismissed at 3:30 p.m. Students at Erie High had attended school from 7:45 a.m. to 2:55 p.m. The school day for students at Northwest Pennsylvania Collegiate Academy had run from 8:10 a.m. to 2:48 p.m.

• Middle school students will start at 8 a.m. and be dismissed at 2:45 p.m. The day for students at East Middle School had run from 7:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m., and the day for students at Strong Vincent and Wilson middle schools had run from 8 a.m. to 2:55 p.m.

New life for Emerson-Gridley

The only restructuring related to a building is the district's consolidation of its alternative-education programs at Emerson-Gridley Elementary School, which the district closed a year ago in its reconfiguration.

The alternative-education programs include the district's Recovery Academy. It is for high school students who have fallen behind in getting their credits and are at risk of not getting a diploma.

Parental discretion and the weather

Parents will still be allowed to keep their children home from school due to weather-related concerns, but only if the superintendent announces that "a parental discretion" day is in effect.

Parents had been able to use their discretion to keep their children home on their own, without an announcement from the school district. Too many parents were abusing the policy, which led to the change, Brokman said.

"It cleans the entire thing up," he said of the new policy for a parental discretion day. "It clarifies what it means."

Students who stay home due to parental discretion must still bring a note to school explaining their absence or the district will mark their day away as an unexcused absence. No students are marked absent if the school district orders schools closed due to the weather.

Limiting family vacations

Families will still be able to take students out of school for vacations during the academic year, but the approval process will be more stringent as the school district seeks to boost its attendance rate.

The district is no longer counting as excused absences the day students miss due to family vacations. Those days will now count as unexcused absences, and approval of the vacations must come from the superintendent rather than building administrators.

"I am looking at attendance, behavior, grades," Polito said in his criteria for evaluating vacation requests. "We want our kids to be here during the school year. We do discourage the use of family vacations."

New statewide policies have contributed to the Erie School District's emphasis on reducing absenteeism. Under Pennsylvania law, a student absent 10 percent of the school year — or 18 days — is "chronically absent" whether the absences are excused or unexcused.

And "chronic absenteeism" is a category the state will consider in its new rating system for school performance, called the Future PA Ready Index. The state is scheduled to implement the index in 2018-19 under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act. Other categories in the index include career readiness and test scores.

By reducing the number of family vacations, the Erie School District hopes to reduce the possibility of a student missing 18 or more days and adding to the district's rate of chronic absenteeism.

"You could be a great student, request a family vacation for three weeks and miss 15 days of school," Brokman said. "If you are sick three other times, you are considered to be chronically absent by the state."

In 2017-18, a total of 349 Erie School District students were absent for 1,744 days due to family vacations, according to district figures. The average length of the vacations was five days. In 2016-17, a total of 363 students were absent a total of 1,874 days due to vacations. The average length of the vacation was five days.

Though the district expects those numbers to drop in 2018-19, officials also know requests for family vacations will continue to come in.

"I have two already," Polito said in late July.

Definition of 'terroristic threats' expands

The district's multi-layered response to the recent school shootings nationwide includes improving security at its buildings' entrances and exits. The district is also enhancing the definition of what constitutes a terroristic threat under district policy.

A threat does not have to be verbal to constitute a violation that warrants discipline, such as a suspension. The district, under the new policy, also will make no exceptions for threats made in a careless or joking manner. "All threatening comments or actions of this nature will be presumed to be serious and consequenced accordingly," according to the revised handbook.

"We are just trying to make sure that we tighten a little bit and let the students know on the front end that even comments or drawings or anything that you think is a joke will be dealt with as if it was still a serious threat, just because of the nature of what the national trend seems to be in these kinds of incidents," Brokman said.

"They need to be aware of the consequences of their actions," Polito said.

Other disciplinary changes

The district in 2018-19 added vaping to its smoking ban. It also included "retaliation" as a specific offense in its code of conduct, to account for cases in which students have faced retaliation for reporting disciplinary violations or testifying at disciplinary hearings.

The district also expanded the definition of fighting, which is typically not an offense for which a student can be expelled.

Starting in 2018-19, if a student gets into a fight that draws a large crowd or otherwise creates a disruption, the student can be expelled. Fights of that nature caused problems in 2017-18 at Erie High, which finished the year with 2,227 students.

"Especially at Erie High, with the number of students we have up there, we want to discourage gathering around those incidents as much as possible," Polito said.

And in another change at the high school level, the district in 2018-19 will prohibit a student from participating in graduation ceremonies if he or she has more than 20 unexcused absences.

The absences cannot prevent a student from graduating, as long as the student has all the required credits, but the district wanted a mechanism for penalizing seniors who develop severe cases of "senioritis" and miss an extended amount of days. Brokman said the high school principals suggested the change.

Looking ahead

Polito said the school district will continue to adapt in 2018-19 as it evaluates its new disciplinary rules and tests other ideas.

One change that will start slowly in 2018-19 is the reintroduction of in-school suspensions. The district eliminated the practice 10 years ago to save money.

Instead of paying teachers to preside over in-schools suspensions, known as ISS, the district had students serve out-of-school suspensions, known as OSS. The Future PA Ready Index will classify out-of-school suspensions as absences that will count toward the district's rating under chronic absenteeism, Brokman said.

By replacing OSS with ISS, Polito said, the district can keep troubled students in school, where they can catch up on schoolwork while serving the suspension. He said the district in 2018-19 will let schools implement ISS when staffing allows. The district plans to broaden the program in 2019-20.

The reintroduction of ISS represents another way the district hopes to achieve one of its most critical goals.

"We want to work to keep the kids in school," Polito said.

Ed Palattella can be reached at 870-1813 or by email. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNpalattella.

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